by James Martin
Then, all at once, another image came to her. Jesus was walking beside her in a beautiful garden, wearing her father’s old gloves and her mother’s gardening hat. What a strange image. It seemed as if they were walking near the tomb from which he rose on Easter Sunday. Sort of. She wasn’t sure. But she felt happy to be with him, and because Paul told her that her first image was okay, she now allowed herself to think about this one: Jesus walking with her.
Anne inhaled, relaxed even more, and thought about that for a long while. A minute passed. Then she wished that she could talk to him.
So she thought she would.
Anne said, I miss him.
She kept her eyes closed and waited.
Then in her imagination he said to her, I know.
She couldn’t believe it. It seemed like a natural thing for him to say, as if he had been waiting to say it to her for a long time. It wasn’t a vision or anything like that. And she certainly didn’t hear it—like hearing the pew creak when she shifted. No, it was like something she thought of spontaneously, like in a daydream or an image that came into her mind when she was reading a novel. Jesus said it calmly too, almost as if it made him sad. He sounded a little bit like Father Paul and a little bit like her father. And a little bit like her mother too. Calm.
It frightened her a little, so she opened her eyes to reassure herself. She was still in the chapel, which was still dark, quiet, and, except for her, empty. When Anne closed her eyes again, she thought about what just happened and wondered if it was real, or made any sense, or was simply crazy. It was comforting, but also disturbing, and she opened her eyes again.
Anne passed her right hand over the smooth wood of the pew top in front of her and wondered how many people had come to this place seeking answers. She rubbed the top of the pew a few times, back and forth, and then stood, pulled the car keys from her pocket, and left the chapel.
Now tears sprang to her eyes when she remembered her time in the chapel. What did it all mean? Her hands still submerged in the warm soapy water, Anne turned to look at the photo of her baptism on the refrigerator and saw her white clothes, the same color that Jesus wore in the garden.
Then she heard a loud crack: a bat connecting with a baseball.
It was almost seven thirty. June was in full swing, and so were the boys in the neighborhood, playing baseball. She was amazed at the deep voices she heard through the closed window. When Jeremiah had died, his voice was just beginning to change. Those of his peers had continued on the journey toward manhood.
A solitary figure raced across her yard, picked up the stray ball, and yelled, “See ya!” to unseen friends in the yard next door. He trudged across her yard, head down, on his way home. Anne quickly opened the window over the sink and yelled out, “Brad!”
He froze and stared at her house as if it were a dangerous, living thing. Lightning bugs flickered around him in the darkness, and crickets sang. As he stood there, he remembered getting into trouble for turning a garden hose on that very window, after Jeremiah had dared him. They didn’t know it was open, and Brad ended up getting water all over the kitchen floor. Jeremiah’s mom was furious, but Jeremiah couldn’t stop laughing, even after his mom flew out of the house, yelling at the both of them.
“Just a minute, Brad,” Anne said from the window. And she disappeared from sight.
That night came back to Brad. Really it had never left.
It was just like tonight, sultry. After a long day of doing nothing (unless you counted playing video games, seeing who could make the blackest marks by skidding his bike to a halt on the sidewalk, and setting piles of dead leaves on fire with a magnifying glass), Brad, Jeremiah, and Gary wanted to see that movie on the first night it was out. Brad begged his parents to drive him, but they wouldn’t. Neither would Jeremiah’s mom. She didn’t want Jeremiah to go at all. So Brad convinced the other two to ride their bikes up Germantown Pike, where they were forbidden to go because of the heavy traffic.
“Baby!” he yelled to Jeremiah, who was afraid to ride his bike anywhere near the highway.
Brad remembered all of it. They were late for the movie and needed to reach the other side of road quickly. Gary and Brad zipped across the four-lane highway easily, dodging cars and laughing as they did so.
“Come on!” he and Gary yelled at Jeremiah, daring him to cross. “Don’t be such a baby!” They turned their backs.
What Brad remembered most was putting his right foot on the bike pedal, ready to push it down to propel his bike, and then hearing the bump, which sounded like someone had hit another car. When he turned around, his right foot still poised on the pedal, he saw someone lying in the street and a bike by the side of the road. Cars screeched to a halt on both sides of the highway, and by the time Brad reached the scene, the driver of the car was kneeling next to someone. When he saw his best friend, he threw up.
In tears, an hour later, after the ambulances and the police and their questions, Brad told his father and mother, though no one else, what he had done. Over and over his father and mother told him that it wasn’t his fault, but he knew it was. He had decided they would go. He had convinced Jeremiah. He had told him to cross the street. He knew. He did it.
Brad didn’t tell anyone how much he thought about Jeremiah. Not Gary, not his parents, not his teachers, not any of his friends in school. Not even the counselor the school hired to help him and the rest of his class after the accident.
After the funeral, he sat in a forking branch in the old crabapple tree in his back yard so that no one would see him. He cried so hard he thought he would choke.
He thought about J a lot. That’s what they called each other: B and J. Those were names only the two of them used; no one else could, and only they knew that it wasn’t “Bee” and “Jay,” which wasn’t cool. And there were no periods either, they had told Anne. Not B. and J. Just B and J.
No one knew this: he thought about J every day. When he played baseball, he thought of J, because he taught J the right way to hold a bat. (“How can you not know that, dude?” he said when he first saw J’s crazy batting stance. J’s face turned red, and Brad, instantly regretting his words, helped his friend adjust his hands on the bat.) When he was flipping through TV channels and caught their favorite cartoon in reruns, he thought of J. They used to watch that show on Saturday mornings with bowls of cereal on their laps and fall off the couch laughing about it, until J’s mom made them shut it off. Now Brad thought the cartoon was pretty lame, but he watched it secretly sometimes. It was like being with J again, a little. When he passed the bus stop where they used to see who could spit the farthest, he thought of J. He didn’t know if it was weird to think about someone who had been dead for three years, so he didn’t tell anyone.
Brad looked at the house, terrified. J was still thirteen to him. He once asked his father whether, when he met J in heaven, he would be thirteen or grown up. Would J keep up with him? Or would Brad turn into a thirteen-year-old so that J could recognize him?
J’s mom swung open the screen door. She was holding something by her side. Brad tensed up. He had avoided seeing her one-on-one for three years. Was she going to yell at him? As she walked over to him, Brad noticed that the crickets had stopped singing.
“How are you doing, Brad?” she said with a smile.
“Fine,” he said quietly.
She could barely see his face in the dark, but the tone of his voice touched her with a deep sadness. When he looked at her, it was with an expression of either discomfort or fear—she couldn’t tell. She was surprised to see stubble on his face, and she realized that Jeremiah would probably look like this too. Brad was now taller than Anne. Imagine.
“I hear you’re driving now,” she said.
Brad grinned slightly. “Yeah, I got my license the other day. It’s pretty cool to be able to drive. I wish . . .”
He stopped. A lightning bug landed on the front of his shirt and blinked its tail once.
“I wish I could tell J,” he said, seem
ing as surprised to say it as she was to hear it.
“You were a good friend to him,” she said.
Brad fixed his eyes on the ground. Anne could sense his discomfort, even the need to escape this conversation.
“I miss him,” he said, blinking back tears. Then he said, “I think about him a lot.”
“Me too.”
The lightning bug lit up the front of his shirt.
“You know,” said Anne. “I don’t think I ever told you what Jeremiah said about you a few days before the accident. He said that you were the funnest person he ever knew. I think that’s a really great compliment.”
Brad stared at his sneakers. “Mmm hmm.”
“So I wanted to give you this,” she said, holding out a baseball glove with a letter “J” written in black magic marker on the outside of the thumb.
Brad put the baseball he was carrying into his pocket, wiped his hands on his shorts, took the glove from Anne, and said nothing. Then he slipped his hand inside the glove.
“Thanks,” he said. As he looked at J’s glove, his mouth turned down, his head dropped, his lips tightened almost to the point of turning white, and he began crying in earnest. Brad made no sound, but in the silence Anne could hear the tears falling onto his T-shirt. Anne grabbed him before he could say anything and hugged him tight. She noticed how tall he was and wondered if Jeremiah would have been as tall as his father. The question made her squeeze her eyes shut.
She thought she would cry, but she felt only calm. After a few moments she released him, because she knew enough about teenage boys to know that he was probably uncomfortable.
“Thanks . . . for the glove,” he said, head still bowed.
“Thanks for being such a good friend to J.”
She smiled, turned, and walked back toward her house.
After the screen door slammed, Brad remained in the yard, wiped his tears with his right hand, and blew his nose on the bottom of his T-shirt. He looked at J’s house. Then he opened and closed his hand inside the glove, put his face to the old leather, and inhaled. It smelled like his past.
25
“You’ve been a big help to Annie,” said Father Edward to Father Paul, who was glad that the old priest was finally out of the infirmary wing and back in his dormitory room.
Paul sat on a wooden chair in Edward’s room, where he was seeking some advice. Paul often used his former novice director as a sounding board.
In the twenty-five years since Paul had been in the novitiate, Edward had changed. All of his former novices said so. As novice director, Edward had been a formidable man: austere, rigid, and even harsh. But age and a bout with cancer ten years ago had mellowed him. Now the community saw him as a cheerful, relaxed, and at times playful man. Thanks to age, experience, and the workings of grace, Edward was the freest man Paul had ever met.
“Thanks,” said Paul. “Occasionally I’m not sure how to approach Anne. I’ve counseled people who are grieving, of course, but usually not someone so doubtful about God. So I sometimes feel off-kilter. The other day I suggested that she do some imaginative contemplation, and imagine herself talking to God, and you should have seen the look on her face. It’s a delicate balance, as you know. I don’t want to force her toward a belief that may not be natural to her. At the same time, God’s really working in her. So I’m just praying that I give her freedom and help her see God’s invitation.”
“Well, remember,” he said. “Spirituality is like spaghetti.”
Paul suppressed a smile. He had heard this analogy many times in the novitiate, but he let his old novice director offer it again.
“When my mother, may she rest in peace, cooked spaghetti, she used to throw a few strands against the kitchen wall. When it stuck, she said it was done. It’s the same in the spiritual life. Not every homily you preach or insight you offer will stick. A lot depends on where the person is, whether they’re open to hearing what you have to say, and whether it’s the right time for them to hear it. One day you say something that you think is profound, and they just shrug. A few months later, you say the same thing, and they start crying. Who knows? In other words, a lot of it depends on grace. Maybe all of it.”
Paul agreed. He had given enough homilies and counseled enough monks to know that the most offhand comment sometimes seemed to the hearer the wisest thing ever said, and insights that Paul deemed helpful could leave a monk more confused than when he had come into the abbot’s office.
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s a blessing to be with Anne. And I won’t break confidence, but it’s been wonderful that the two of you have reconnected. Imagine your having baptized her all those years ago.”
“A blessing for me too,” said Edward. “I had always wondered whatever had become of her. And it was a grace to be reminded of my, um, more active days.” Laboriously rising from his easy chair, he made his way to his bookcase.
Father Edward had more mementoes than most monks at P&J, and technically the monks’ cells were not supposed to be crammed with possessions, but Paul allowed the older members of the community more latitude.
“Her parents were wonderful,” he said, poking through an old shoebox on his bookshelf. “Just wonderful.”
A yellowing photo was fished out of the shoebox and handed to the abbot. It showed a smiling man with a full head of gray hair sitting at the abbot’s desk. He wore a white button-down shirt, with its sleeves rolled up, and a tie at half-mast. Surrounded by a pile of papers and an old calculator, he was apparently poring over the monastery’s accounts. Paul grinned when he realized that the furniture in the abbot’s office was precisely the same as it is today.
“That’s something,” said Paul. “Her father?”
“Mmm hmm,” said Edward. “And a good friend to me.”
Edward proffered another photo of a young couple with a small child standing outside the abbey church. The mother, looking squarely at the camera, held the child in her arms, who reached out to grab three fingers on her father’s hand. “That’s Annie’s mother of course. Very sweet woman. They were a great couple.”
“Her mother had a huge heart, and she was also quite lovely, as you can see,” said Edward. “And Annie is just as lovely, I think.”
Paul remembered how she looked the other day: tanned and fit, wearing a tailored white shirt and khaki pants that showed off a slim figure. Occasionally, Paul felt attracted to women he met, but it rarely bothered him. It was simply part of life. He reminded himself that he’d feel this way if he were a married man who was attracted to a coworker.
Only once during his monastic life had Paul fallen deeply in love—with a woman he met at a Catholic college in Minnesota during a weeklong conference on, of all things, monasticism. She was a bright academic, recently divorced, roughly his age, and it was easy to fall into conversation with her. After a few laughter-filled meals together, Paul realized that he was falling in love. After the conference ended and Paul returned to the monastery and she to her university job in Ohio, the two carried on a correspondence. Within a few months, she wrote him a letter confessing that she had strong feelings for him.
Paul never told her about his own attraction, because he felt such a disclosure would lead her to think there was a future in the relationship. Even with a good deal of self-knowledge and a few hundred miles between them, the relationship proved a challenge for Paul. In the end, he reminded himself of the life he had chosen and how happy he was as a monk. In a letter to her, Paul told her how grateful he was for her friendship, but also that writing so frequently probably wasn’t a good idea for either of them. A few years later, when she remarried, Paul found himself relieved. Now they exchanged Christmas cards.
As abbot, Paul also knew of the occasional monk who had fallen in love with another monk. That was a more difficult situation, given the challenges of proximity. Usually things worked themselves out when the monks focused on the rest of the community, found satisfaction in their work and prayer, and were able to put some emo
tional distance between themselves. Sometimes, though, it didn’t work out, and one or both monks ended up leaving.
Since he was speaking with his former novice director, Paul figured it couldn’t hurt to mention what was on his mind. “That’s a little bit of a challenge for me when it comes to Anne.”
“You know the old saying,” Edward said, sinking back into his chair. “Those feelings don’t go away until ten minutes after we’re dead. As long as we acknowledge those feelings and remind ourselves that as monks we don’t have to act on them, we’ll be okay. And it’s important to talk about this with God in your prayer. I’m sure I told you this a thousand years ago in the novitiate, but those feelings show you that you’re alive.”
Father Edward then shrugged his shoulders and said, “It’s a struggle sometimes of course. But what life doesn’t have struggles? The key is love. As long as your chastity helps you to love, you’re okay. Because that’s all God asks from us here. To love.”
Paul was grateful for the encouragement. Spending time with his old novice director also reminded him of the time when he was still in his “first fervor,” as the monks called it: right after he entered, when he still thought that the monastery was perfect. After a year, the honeymoon ended, as it did in every relationship. Then Paul saw the monastery as it was—a place where people tried to live holy lives, but a place that was no less mixed up than any other human community. Reconnecting with the basics of his vocation—why he entered, what drew him here, what the vows meant—always rekindled his youthful ardor, which helped him in his current life.
“Plus,” said Edward, “you’ve been a big help to Annie. So why not just relax?”
Paul nodded, grateful for the advice.
“So, Ed, I’m off to meet with her now. Pray for us.”
“Oh,” he said, “I’ve been doing that since she came back to us.”
After the abbot gave Father Edward his blessing, he left his room. On the way to his office, he passed the cloister garden. He had a few minutes before his meeting with Anne, so he decided to sit on the bench and enjoy the view, which since becoming abbot he had not had as much time to do.